Coupang logistics center fire exposes warehouse safety risks

As firefighters continued the third day of their battle to contain a massive blaze at Coupang’s logistics center in Incheon, the incident exposes deeper structural weaknesses of warehouses that can turn a single ignition into a prolonged, hard-to-control inferno.

The fire broke out early Saturday morning on the sixth floor of the eight-story facility — one of the company’s largest distribution centers — located in Seohae District.

All on-site workers evacuated safely and no fatalities have been reported.

But despite hundreds of firefighters and fleets of emergency vehicles deployed under an expanded national mobilization order, the blaze continued to smolder with repeated flare-ups as of Monday afternoon.

The prolonged battle is drawing comparisons to previous warehouse disasters, including a 2021 fire that burned for nearly six days at Coupang’s Deokpyeong center in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, and a 2022 fire at a cold storage facility in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, which took more than 19 hours to extinguish and claimed the lives of three firefighters.

According to fire s ...